![]() Your goal is to reduce the opposing player’s Resolve to zero. The way conversation works in Griftlands is card based. In early builds, the game was entirely based on RNG rolls for success or failure, and I think this system is far, far more interesting and has way more potential. Regardless of all that, though, the reason I’m bringing Griftlands up is that the conversation system is really interesting, and the way individuals and factions relate is really neat. I think it would have given more opportunities for more interesting storytelling, but who could say. The game was originally planned to be some kind of RPG, and I kind of wish they had stayed on that route, even if they continued with the procgen stuff. I’m not particularly excited about it being a Rogue-like. The combat feels a little too close to Slay the Spire for my taste, which is still plenty of fun but isn’t something to write home about in and of itself. I think there are some issues with the game I have. So, I snagged Griftlands during the EGS Sale, and I have to say, the way the game conveys this stuff is really interesting. What kept me playing wasn’t the idea of seeing the next dungeon or boss or collecting new items, it was putting the towns back together and finding the oddly moving micro-stories of these characters’ lives. A soldier is mourning his friends, who died serving a wicked ruler. A woman was reincarnated as a goat she can’t speak to tell her husband who she is but she likes to see him. A rat is terrified of a cat, who assures you that it doesn’t want to kill rats, but it needs to eat. Two gnome lovers are sitting at a table, one is thinking of finding someone new. Some characters will help you progress, most are just living their lives. When you free a soul, a character appears back at the current act’s town hub. The game’s structure is simple: hack and slash through dungeons, destroying monster spawners that contain trapped souls. Put another way, Soul Blazer is about rebuilding communities in the face of global disaster caused by short-sighted greed. The player is an angel sent to delve some dungeons and free the souls, rebuilding the towns that had been destroyed. King Magridd made a deal with a death deity called Deathtoll: one gold piece for each soul in the kingdom. It’s a 1992 SNES action-RPG from Quintet, with stiff action, a ludicrous plot, and that terse awkwardness unique to early-90s translations. When read this way, it is a super-hopeful game that I found really important and necessary in 2019. And with the Hiss as a memetic, resonant harm (light early game spoilers) that infects using the connections between people, and (vague later game spoilers) Jesse’s journey to find herself and her inner strength? Hell yeah I’m going to include it here. Finding a way to reconnect in the face of death made for a very poignant game even in the time I spent with it.įinally, Control fits into this category for me too–not only because of Jesse seeking to reconnect with her brother and her past, but because of the human connections she makes even acting as the figure of authority, the Director, over the course of the game. It was also a game that featured themes I am personally all too familiar with this year as I’ve lost both a grandparent and close relative in the last year to cancer and illness. ![]() ![]() Mutazione, though something I didn’t put as much time into as I would’ve liked, was also a bittersweet game about making connections, growth, and renewal, using an island separated from the world by a disaster as a narrative that can be read for isolated peoples, or reconnecting with lost family. In Eliza, having to counsel people as a human standin for an AI counselor while being unable to actually help them neatly paralleled Evelyn’s personal crisis in the face of trying to create technology to help people with their mental health, but instead creating a new, unique set of problems. In NeoCab, carrying passengers around while also trying to gently untangle their anxieties about the world around them, and my increasing misgivings about whether my “best friend” was a good person or just someone using me hit me surprisingly hard. Not only are these games about technology and the gig economy, but they both have sharp and poignant commentary on personal relationships and how they fit in. To go first, there’s a lot of games I played that fit into this category, which is why I thought it was a fitting category for 2019.įirstly, games like NeoCab and Eliza fit this to a T.
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